Timeline of Tea
Tea from the Shennong legend and tomb finds of the 5th to 2nd centuries BCE through Lu Yu's "Classic of Tea", Japan's tea ceremony, the European and Russian tea trade, colonial plantations and the tea bag to bubble tea and a UNESCO listing in 2023.
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- 26 events traditionally 2737 BCE – 2023
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- by claude-opus-5-5
traditionally 2737 BCE: Legend credits Shennong with discovering tea
Chinese tradition holds that Shennong, a mythical ruler revered as a founder of farming and herbal medicine, discovered tea when leaves blew into water he was boiling, or found it an antidote to poisonous plants he tasted. The story has no historical basis and its date, repeated in modern tea histories, varies (2727 BCE is also given); Lu Yu's eighth-century "The Classic of Tea" already credited Shennong with tea drinking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shennong~141 BCE: Tea buds buried with Emperor Jing of Han
Plant remains from a burial pit at the mausoleum of Emperor Jing of Han near Xi'an were identified in 2016 as tea buds from their caffeine, theanine and crystal structure; similar remains at Gurgyam in western Tibet, from about 200 CE, suggest a branch of the Silk Road carried tea onto the plateau. In 2021 a Shandong University team reported older tea dregs, dated to about 453 – 410 BCE, from a Warring States tomb at Zoucheng.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangling_Mausoleum_of_Han59 BCE: Wang Bao's contract mentions buying and boiling tea
In a humorous mock contract for a household slave in Sichuan, the poet Wang Bao listed duties including boiling tea and buying it at the Wuyang market, suggesting tea was already a market commodity there. Researchers treat the text, "Contract for a Youth", as the first unambiguous written reference to tea as a beverage; like older texts it writes tea with the character tu, which could also name other bitter plants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Bao~760: Lu Yu writes "The Classic of Tea"
Lu Yu, said to have been a foundling raised in a Buddhist monastery in Hubei, wrote the earliest known book devoted to tea: about 7,000 characters in ten chapters on the plant, the tools for steaming and pressing leaves into cakes, the utensils, and the proper way to boil and drink it. Accounts date its writing between 760 and about 780. Tea merchants later venerated Lu Yu as a god of tea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Classic_of_Tea815: Monk Eichū serves tea to Emperor Saga
The court chronicle "Nihon Kōki" records that during Emperor Saga's visit to Ōmi Province, Eichū, a monk who had studied in Tang China, served him tea at the temple Bonshaku-ji, the earliest reliable record of tea drinking in Japan. The monks Saichō and Kūkai are traditionally credited with bringing seeds about 805 – 806, but tea stayed a rarity of the court and clergy. In Korea, seeds from Tang China were planted on Mount Jiri by royal order in 828.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tea_in_Japan#Early_history1074: Song creates the Tea and Horse Agency
Needing cavalry horses for its wars with the Liao and Western Xia states, the Song government under the reformer Wang Anshi created the Tea and Horse Agency in Sichuan, a state monopoly that bought Sichuan tea and exchanged it for horses from Tibetan peoples. Caravan routes later called the Tea Horse Road carried tea, much of it compressed into bricks, onto the Tibetan plateau for centuries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Horse_Road1211: Eisai writes Japan's first book on tea
The Zen monk Eisai, who had returned from Song China in 1191 with tea seeds and the practice of whisking powdered tea, wrote "Kissa Yōjōki" ("Drinking Tea for Health"), praising tea as medicine; he presented a revised text to the shogun Minamoto no Sanetomo in 1214. Seeds he gave to the monk Myōe were planted at Toganoo and Uji, which became Japan's first major tea districts, and tea spread among Zen monks and the samurai class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisai1391: Hongwu Emperor ends tribute in pressed tea cakes
The Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming dynasty, ordered that tribute tea be sent to court as loose leaves rather than as elaborate pressed cakes, citing the labor the cakes cost the people. Steeping loose leaves in hot water became the norm in China, while the whisked powdered tea of the Song dynasty fell out of use there and survived in Japan, where it developed into matcha.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_tea_culture#Ming_era1580s: Sen no Rikyū refines the wabi tea ceremony
Sen no Rikyū, tea master to the warlords Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, is regarded as the most influential exponent of the austere wabi style of chanoyu begun by Murata Jukō and Takeno Jōō, favoring tiny rustic rooms such as the two-mat Tai-an, Raku bowls and bamboo utensils. Hideyoshi ordered him to commit ritual suicide in 1591; the three Sen family schools of tea, including Urasenke, descend from him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sen_no_Riky%C5%AB1610: Dutch East India Company brings tea to Europe
The Dutch East India Company (VOC), which had begun trading at Hirado in Japan in 1609, landed a consignment of Japanese green tea in the Netherlands, by most accounts the first commercial shipment of tea to Europe; some accounts date the first Dutch import to 1606. Portuguese traders and missionaries had described tea from the later 16th century. Expensive at first, tea spread from the Dutch Republic to other countries of western Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company1658: London newspaper advertises tea for sale
An advertisement in "Mercurius Politicus" in September offered the "China Drink, called by the Chinese, Tcha, by other Nations Tay alias Tee" at the Sultaness Head coffee house near the Royal Exchange; Thomas Garway had begun selling tea in London a year earlier. Catherine of Braganza, who married Charles II in 1662, helped make tea fashionable at court, but heavy duties kept it expensive into the 18th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_in_the_United_Kingdom#Sale_of_tea_begins1727: Treaty of Kyakhta opens the Siberian tea route
The Treaty of Kyakhta between Russia and Qing China channeled their trade through Kyakhta on the Mongolian border south of Lake Baikal, where Siberian furs were bartered for Chinese goods. Cotton and silk led at first, but by the early 19th century tea had become the main Chinese export there, carried by camel caravans across Mongolia as loose leaf and pressed bricks; Chinese tea could enter Russia by sea from 1861, and the Trans-Siberian Railway later ended Kyakhta's role.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyakhta_trade1757: Qing China confines Western trade to Canton
The Qianlong Emperor restricted European ships to Canton (Guangzhou), where licensed Chinese merchants, organized from 1760 as the Cohong, handled all their trade under close official control. Western demand centered on tea, which buyers had to pay for largely in silver because few Western goods sold in China; the Canton System lasted until 1842.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_System1773: Boston colonists dump East India Company tea
The Tea Act of May 1773 let the struggling East India Company ship tea directly to the American colonies, undercutting smuggled Dutch tea while keeping the Townshend duty that colonists rejected as taxation without representation. On December 16, men partly disguised as Native Americans emptied 342 chests from three ships into Boston Harbor, and Parliament answered with the punitive Coercive Acts of 1774.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Tea_Party1784: Commutation Act cuts Britain's tea duty
Advised by the tea merchant Richard Twining, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger cut the tax on tea from 119 percent to 12.5 percent. Smuggled tea, which by some estimates had exceeded legal imports, lost its price advantage almost at once, and legally imported tea became affordable to far more of the British population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutation_Act_17841839: First Assam tea is auctioned in London
After the Scottish trader Robert Bruce reportedly learned in 1823 that Singpho people in Assam brewed a native tea plant, the East India Company, losing its monopoly of the China trade, set up a Tea Committee and an experimental garden. Its first Assam tea, shipped in 1838, sold at auction in London in January, and the Assam Company was founded to develop the industry; by 1888 Britain imported more tea from India than from China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assam_tea1839 – 1842: Britain and China fight the First Opium War
British purchases of Chinese tea, paid for largely in silver, had been offset since the late 18th century by sales of opium from British India smuggled into China. When the Qing commissioner Lin Zexu seized and destroyed British merchants' opium at Canton, Britain went to war, and the Treaty of Nanjing of 1842 ended the Canton System, opened five ports to foreign trade and ceded Hong Kong Island.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War1848: Robert Fortune collects Chinese tea plants for India
The East India Company sent the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune to China, where he traveled in Chinese dress beyond the areas open to foreigners, collected tea plants and seeds, shipped them to India in sealed glass Wardian cases and recruited Chinese tea makers to teach their methods. Chinese-type bushes are still the basis of Darjeeling tea, but the native Assam variety came to dominate most Indian production.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fortune1865: Penal contracts imposed on Assam tea workers
A Bengal labor act made breach of an indenture contract punishable and let Assam tea planters arrest absconding laborers without a warrant, as recruiters brought migrants from other parts of British India, many of them Adivasis from the Chota Nagpur plateau, amid fraud and high mortality. An 1882 act lengthened contracts to five years, and the last penal labor law used on the gardens, the Workman's Breach of Contract Act of 1859, was repealed only in 1926.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea-garden_community#Recruitment1866: Clippers race the season's first tea to London
In the Great Tea Race, the clippers Taeping, Ariel and Serica, which had left Fuzhou on the same tide more than three months earlier, docked in London within two hours of one another, Taeping first. Steamships carrying larger cargoes were already faster, and the Suez Canal, opened in 1869 and impractical for sailing ships, ended the clipper era of the tea trade.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Tea_Race_of_18661867: James Taylor starts commercial tea growing in Ceylon
On the Loolecondera estate near Kandy, the Scottish planter James Taylor planted about 8 hectares of tea, succeeding where earlier attempts had failed, and processed leaves with methods learned from Assam. When coffee leaf rust, first seen in Ceylon in 1869, destroyed the island's coffee plantations in little more than a decade, planters replanted with tea, worked largely by Tamil laborers recruited from southern India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Taylor_(tea_planter)1903: Milwaukee inventors patent a mesh tea-leaf holder
Roberta C. Lawson and Mary McLaren of Milwaukee received a US patent for a "tea-leaf holder", a pocket of open-mesh fabric designed to hold leaves during brewing. It was an early precursor of the disposable tea bag. The later story that importer Thomas Sullivan accidentally invented the tea bag when customers brewed his silk sample bags is unverified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_bag~1930: McKercher's rollers crush, tear and curl tea
At the Amgoorie tea estate in Assam, William McKercher introduced a machine whose toothed rollers crush, tear and curl withered leaves into small, hard pellets that brew quickly into strong, dark tea; accounts date it to 1930 or 1931. Crush, tear, curl (CTC) manufacture spread across India and Africa from the 1950s and became the main method for the black tea used in tea bags and in Indian milk tea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crush,_tear,_curl1964: Kenya organizes smallholder tea growers
Kenya established the Kenya Tea Development Authority (KTDA) to support smallholder tea production after independence, replacing a colonial development body. Its factories and marketing system helped small farmers enter an industry previously dominated by estates. Kenya became a major black-tea exporter, and the authority was privatized into a farmer-owned company in 2000.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenya_Tea_Development_Agency1980s: Taiwanese teahouses add tapioca pearls to tea
Two Taiwanese teahouses claim pearl milk tea: Hanlin Tea Room in Tainan says its founder, Tu Tsong-he, added white tapioca balls from a local market in 1986, while Chun Shui Tang in Taichung, known for iced tea shaken in cocktail shakers, credits its employee Lin Hsiu-hui in 1987 or 1988. Their legal dispute ended with a court finding that anyone could make the drink, which spread across East and Southeast Asia in the 1990s and then worldwide as bubble tea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_tea2023: UNESCO lists Jingmai Mountain's old tea forests
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added the Cultural Landscape of Old Tea Forests of the Jingmai Mountain in Pu'er, in Yunnan, to its World Heritage List, recognizing tea grown beneath the forest canopy by the Blang and Dai peoples following practices dating to the 10th century. In 2022 UNESCO had listed China's traditional tea processing techniques, covering green, yellow, dark, white, oolong and black teas, as intangible cultural heritage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pu%27er_tea